Related papers: The Universe at extreme magnification
Gravitational lensing of high-redshift supernovae is potentially an important source of uncertainty when deriving cosmological parameters from the measured brightness of Type Ia supernovae, especially in deep surveys with scarce statistics.…
The magnification induced by gravitational microlensing is sensitive to the size of a source relative to the Einstein radius, the natural microlensing scale length. This paper investigates the effect of source size in the case where the…
The locations of massive stars (> 8 Msun) within their host galaxies is reviewed. These range from distributed OB associations to dense star clusters within giant HII regions. A comparison between massive stars and the environments of…
Although a source star is fainter than the detection limit imposed by crowding, it is still possible to detect an event if the star is located in the seeing disk of a bright star is and gravitationally amplified: amplification bias. Using a…
Detecting compact objects by means of their gravitational lensing effect on an observed companion in a binary system has already been suggested almost four decades ago. However, these predictions were made even before the first observations…
It has been proposed that the Galaxy might contain a population of cold clouds in numbers sufficient to account for a substantial fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. These clouds would have masses of the order of 10^{-3} Solar mass…
The detection of microlensing events from stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud and in the Galactic bulge raise important constraints on the distribution of dark matter and on galactic structure, although some events may be due to a new type…
We estimate the fraction of mass that is composed of compact objects in gravitational lens galaxies. This study is based on microlensing measurements (obtained from the literature) of a sample of 29 quasar image pairs seen through 20 lens…
On the 29th of May 2023, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration observed a compact binary coalescence event consistent with a neutron star-black hole merger, though the heavier object of mass 2.5-4.5 $M_\odot$ would fall into the purported…
We investigate the effect of a finite source on the planetary-lensing signals of high-magnification events. From this, we find that the dependency of the finite-source effect on the caustic shape is weak and perturbations survive even when…
Planetary nebula (PN) surveys in systems beyond ~10 Mpc often find high-excitation, point-like sources with [O III] $\lambda 5007$ fluxes greater than the apparent bright-end cutoff of the planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF). Here…
We study the gravitational lensing effects of spiral galaxies by taking a model of the Milky Way and computing its lensing properties. The model is composed of a spherical Hernquist bulge, a Miyamoto-Nagai disc and an isothermal halo. As a…
The inner regions of active galaxies host the most extreme and energetic phenomena in the universe including, relativistic jets, supermassive black hole binaries, and recoiling supermassive black holes. However, many of these sources cannot…
Galaxy mergers lead to the formation of massive black hole binaries which can accelerate background stars close to the speed of light. We estimate the comoving density of ejected stars with a peculiar velocity in excess of $0.1c$ or $0.5c$…
We discuss how small-scale density perturbations on the Fresnel scale affect amplitudes and phases of gravitational waves that are magnified by gravitational lensing in geometric optics. We derive equations that connect the small-scale…
It has been shown by Paczy\'nski that gravitational microlensing is potentially a useful method for detecting the dark constituents of the halo of our galaxy, if their mass lies in the approximate domain $10^{-6} < M/M_{\odot} < 10^{-1}$.…
Cosmological observations precisely measure primordial variations in the density of the Universe at megaparsec and larger scales, but much smaller scales remain poorly constrained. However, sufficiently large initial perturbations at small…
The strong lensing events that are observed in compact clusters of galaxies can, both statistically and individually, return important clues about the structural properties of the most massive structures in the Universe. Substantial work is…
The optical rest-frame sizes of 10 of the most massive (~5x10^{11}h_{70}^{-2}M_sun) galaxies found in the near-infrared MUNICS survey at 1.2<z<1.7 are analysed. Sizes were estimated both in the J and K' filters. These massive galaxies are…
Recent studies have shown that massive galaxies in the distant universe are surprisingly compact, with typical sizes about a factor of three smaller than equally massive galaxies in the nearby universe. It has been suggested that these…